My life on the borderlands.

Category Archives: Prayer

Mister Rand has asked us to share our perceptions of the power of belief to tweak probability lines and render some outcomes more probable than they might have been without the actions of belief upon them. Belief—which can be described, if not precisely defined, as [involving] emotional and intellectual investment in a specific [concept], person, cause, or positive [goal]—is often used interchangeably with the words “faith” and “trust”. As we see things, however, belief is closer in meaning to a way of seeing the world that shapes expectations and provides a framework within which the believer interprets everything that happens.

There are some people, for example, who believe that if they ask their deity to provide them with a convenient parking place in a crowded or busy lot, that parking space will materialize almost at once. This belief is buttressed by those times when indeed a parking space does materialize within several minutes of the prayer. Those times when the parking space does not materialize are then interpreted according to the framework of the belief. So if the driver’s belief includes the belief that their God rewards them when they do something good and chastises them when they fail to do something good, the driver may conclude that the parking space did not materialize at once because the driver had done something to piss God off.

Or if the driver’s belief … includes the notion that their God is unconditionally loving, the driver can assume that, with a finite number of convenient parkings spaces available at any given moment, their God had denied our driver the parking space because God know that another driver… had a deeper and greater need for … the gift of the parking spot. Because the God knows the big picture, and knows that, in the most probable future available, if our second driver [had been] denied the parking spot [prayed for by] our first driver, a probability line would have come into being that, down the road a ways, might bring the second driver into disaster. In this way the first driver, who believes in an unconditionally loving deity, can console him- or herself that somehow the greater good was served by the desired parking spot going to somebody else.

Mister Rand asks, “Can belief in a desired outcome draw to the believer a future in which that desired outcome is more probable? Or does a person’s beliefs have no power to affect probability lines unless the believer takes practical steps to make the desired future take place?” Mister Rand [refers to] the movie “The Secret”, which claims that if one believes strongly and vividly enough in a future where one’s deepest desires are satisfied, then that future is assuredly going to happen just as one hoped it would. Desire a bicycle? Pretend you already have it, [says “The Secret”]. Imagine as vividly as you can how the bicycle looks, how it feels under the hand, and how it makes you feel riding it. Do this long enough, and strongly enough, says “The Secret”, and the bicycle will come to you—possibly from an unexpected direction and with no further efforts on your part. “Does this visualization/manifestation technique really work?” asks Mister Rand.

Our answer to this is, sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t. But one can increase the likelihood of that bicycle materializing by bringing in at least three other persons who share one’s belief in “The Secret” technique. All four believers sitting together, praying for the same outcome or visualizing the same good fortune, often subtly tweaks a probability line so that the desired outcome does takes place.

According to our observations in the life of Mister Rand and the lives of those he has encountered, the more persons believe in a desired outcome, the more likely it will materialize, as long as certain conditions are met (see below).

If one brings in a faith circle to assist in the manifestation process, and still the desired outcome does not materialize, it may be because

materializing the desired outcome might prove harmful to the believer or the greater good;

there are additional actions the believer should take in order to position him- or herself to receive the desired outcome, actions which the believer might be reluctant to take because of fear, laziness, or pride;

deep down the believer believes that he or she does not deserve to experience the desired outcome, and so unconsciously is blocking its manifestation;

there is another outcome which the believer desires as much or more than the outcome the faith circle is attempting to materialize, and the materialization of one outcome would cancel out the likelihood of the other materializing;

what the believer wants would, if manifested, violate the laws of spacetime;

the mass consciousness of the faith group, family, or society in which the believer is embedded is bent on materializing a future incompatible with the outcome the believer desires;

or a combination of the above factors.

Whatever the outcome, one can turn over the matter to Divine Love, which, being complete in Itself, desires only your good without thought of thanks, worship, or return. Ask questions, expect answers from any direction at the proper time, and your way through the dilemma will be made clear.

Despite Trump’s win, despite the triumph of the Shadow, we can survive this together.

We can band together on a local level, work on a local level, to help one another, whatever happens next.

There are small miracles on the way. Look for them. Expect them. Invite Spirit to work through your voice, your hands, your heart, your goodness, your intelligence, your kindness, your many, many talents to bring hope to your corner of the world.

Miracles can happen still. They are happening even as you read this. They are happening in you and around you: miracles of love, of compassion, of kindness, of goodness.

Nothing in physical reality maintains its form forever. This includes the shape of spacetime itself, if “shape” can be used to refer to a nonphysical, nontemporal probability construct in which the phenomena of energy and matter can form regular recurring patterns. Therefore degradation, delapidation, denigration, and devastation can seem stronger forces than those of re-emergence, recurrence, innovation, renewal, and resurrection. But “Death”, one of the Tarot’s Major Trumps cards, signifies not just endings, but the beginnings that spring from the endings. So a persistent, invasive terror of death, which at times in his life Mister Rand himself has felt, can actually hide a deeper terror: a terror of rebirth.

Stephen Levine, in his book, Who Dies?, observes that in his experience working with hospice patients, the persons who have been the most fearful of living are those who tend to be the most fearful of dying. For much of his life, Mister Rand has attempted to maintain a sometimes precarious existence on the borderlands of consensus reality—i.e., on the sidelines of life. This is because his early childhood experiences had taught him to expect that it was safest to be invisible. So he never developed the skills requisite for a thriving social life, and greatly feared intimacy, for the most nurturing person in Mister Rand’s childhood had also been one of the most abusive. Consequently, Mister Rand did not easily trust intimacy, as witness the fact that Mister Rand had only one romantic partner, the late Stuart “Alex” Lucker, who died two years into their relationship.

Since that time things have changed for Mister Rand. During his years in Santa Fe, attending a Twelve Step group for persons with eating disorders, he has learned to trust many of the persons he has met in his meetings, and some of them have become friends. In addition, his psychic work, and his … involvement with The Celebration, a leaderless Santa Fe spiritual group, has enriched his social life in ways he could only have dreamed of when he was younger and more frightened.

We say these things not to embarrass Mister Rand, nor to solicit pity for him, but to illustrate the limitations of fear-based thinking when considering all the richness of possibility that physical reality has to offer.

In your Bible it says of the story of redemption, “These things the angels themselves desire to look into.” While in the original the Bible writers intended this sentence as a reference to the concept that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah or Savior of the world, we submit that it can also be employed to refer to physical reality itself—that unbodied spirits long to directly experience for themselves what life in physical reality is like.

What does physical reality have to offer that the nonphysical realities do not? This is an important question, because in your theologies, “Heaven”—being a reference to not only the intangible “afterlife” but also to the sky above your heads—is considered superior to “Earth”, the physical plane in all its manifestations. Yet there are some experiences only available in physical reality, and it is these experiences that the angels desire to look into. Some of these experiences include sensory experiences of light, sound, color, music, scent, texture, movement, and temperature; the pleasures of creativity through art; the pleasure of patient guided unfolding of a possibility as it changes into a reality; and the expansion of understanding triggered by incarnational experiences such as birth, sickness, romance, reproduction, child rearing, freedom fighting, [observing and interacting in love with animals, plants, and insects], and the recovery from illness. The experience of the passage of time itself is an experience that can only be enjoyed and benefitted from by those in physical reality.

In looking over our list, Mister Rand asks (. . .), “But is the joy that physical reality affords us worth the suffering it also affords us? What of the millions suffering unspeakable pain? How can smelling a flower offset the sheer weight of their dismay?” The answer, of course, is that a person dying of AIDS in a back alley needs consolation, water, food, medications, and supportive social interactions, not just the smelling of a flower. And since the hands of God are the hands of Mister Rand and those other spirits who have taken on flesh, seeking God’s will for assessing what help to give the dying person is the responsibility of Mister Rand and his acquaintances. For the joy of helping to relieve another’s suffering is another experience that only physical reality (and thought reality, its close sibling) can provide.

In the nonphysical realities, there is no sense of separation between Self and Other. Individuation does exist in the nonphysical, but it is individuation seen and felt always in its context of All-That-Is. In physical reality, where consciousness often appears limited to, or framed by, the brain organ, physical and emotional separation are regularly experienceable. So opportunities to reveal these separations as the illusions they are at core are precious, and if taken with care and awareness, yield exquisite experiential results.

So there is, in our opinion, a case to be made that Heaven is not superior to Earth; they are two sides of the same coin, different but equal. And Divine Love is present throughout both realities. Call upon It today to make Its presence known to you in your life as you really are just at this moment, and keep on calling upon it until you become aware of the answer. And we thank you for sharing today. •

A good friend gave me an intriguing Christmas present today, a book entitled, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day. The author is David J. Hand, emeritus professor of mathematics and a senior research investigator at Imperial College London. His book aims to explain, via statistics, how the uncertainty that lies at the core of Nature gives rise to statistically mappable, wildly improbable, seemingly miraculous events. “The universe has laws which describe the way it works,” writes Hand, “… The same applies to exceedingly unlikely events. The Improbability Principle is my name for a set of laws of chance which, together, tell us that we should expect the unexpected, and why.” Some seeming improbabilities arise, Hand says, from “fundamental aspects of the way the universe is constructed;” others, from “deep properties of what we mean by probability;” still others, from the mechanism of the human brain as it expresses itself in human psychology. Events that we deem improbable, says Hand, only seem so because of errors in our research or thinking; once those errors are corrected, the improbable is revealed as probable.

Probability interests me, because as a psychic, I’m in the business of sussing out the probable for clients. A client comes to me and asks me what her chances are of finding a loving partner through (let’s say) Match.com. I throw the cards and they say, “Success!”, or “NO way,” or “Um, it might work, but…” If you stop the reading there, you leave the client more or less a victim of fate. But if you ask, “Why is success predicted here?”, or, “Why is this absolutely the wrong approach for her?”, or, “What can she do to maximize her chances of making this work?”, then you get information the client can really learn from and use to make decisions that will load the deck in her favor.

I am severely challenged mathematically, so I cannot and probably never will be able to give you a fair assessment of his research, thinking, or worldview. From a cursory flip through the material, however, it seems clear that, as a statistician, he is convinced that everything has an explanation consonant with mathematics and impersonal physical law. In other words, from Hand’s viewpoint, the fact that you happened to get a client who paid you by PayPal the very day you had run out of money for food was not the result of a supernatural entity answering your previous evening’s pleas for cash, it was the logical outcome of a complex series of events, some of which you had a conscious part in (such as having sent out a Thanksgiving card to all your clients wishing them a good year ahead), some of which had to do with the time of year (post-Christmas letdown), some of which had to do with that client’s choices and circumstances (end of year stimulates desires for a new start), and some of which were entirely accidental. According to this view, then, your getting paid right when you needed it most was not therefore necessarily evidence that a loving Higher Power exists who responds to your pragmatic needs when asked, but only that, sooner or later, given your many years in the psychic business and your wide reputation, it was inevitable that some client would have called you at some point after Christmas, and it just happened to be on the day you needed the moolah. So this would make my attributing these events to a loving Higher Power not the result of faith rewarded or intuition triumphant, but fantasy thinking arising from my very human need to imagine an Invisible Sky Daddy who will take care of me when I am in trouble.

On the other hand, one of the Major Trumps of the Tarot deck is The Fool, which in my experience represents serendipity—chance—as one of the faces of God; that is, chance as one of the ways Divine Love expresses itself in spacetime. The laws of probability and improbability are built into the mechanism of spacetime by the great consciousness of All-That-Is, Who exists both within and outside of spacetime simultaneously (since spacetime is an expression of Itself). So everything about me—when I was born, the family into which I was born, the troubles that led me to get involved in psychic work, the clients I’ve attracted, my difficulty saving money, my making myself available to Spirit, my asking for some cash, the souls I connect with as clients, what happens next week, what happens when I die—while not predetermined, can nonetheless be seen outside of time by the Divine as a complete, fully faceted, jewel of event and experience bound together as the artwork that is me, in this life, this time around.

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About Rand B. Lee, The Rational Psychic

Since the mid-1980s Rand B. Lee has served an international clientele as a professional psychic specializing in life-purpose, career, love, wellness, relationships, spiritual development, prosperity, recovery, the Tarot and trancework. Rand works with individuals, couples, and groups in person, over the telephone, or via Skype.